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Constellation Research to Release 2018 Artificial Intelligence Study

This report delivers findings from the 2018 Constellation Artificial Intelligence Survey, which assesses the state of AI among the first movers, early adopters and fast followers that comprise Constellation’s subscriber base.

Everybody wants to know where the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning is going inside day-to-day IT, and June 5 marks a good opportunity to get some research metrics on all of this.

Constellation Research will soon publish its 2018 Artificial Intelligence Study, and here today in eWEEK, you can get a sneak preview of the highlights.

This report delivers findings from the 2018 Constellation Artificial Intelligence Survey, which assesses the state of AI among the first movers, early adopters and fast followers that comprise Constellation’s subscriber base.

The survey asked C-level executives about the state of AI investment and deployment in their organizations, budgets for AI investment, technologies driving AI development, how AI might impact executives and the workforce, sources of internal resistance to AI, and privacy.

Highlights from the study include:

Widespread adoption with caveats: Seventy percent of respondents to the Constellation 2018 AI Survey indicate their organization currently employs some form of AI technology. This number, however, tells only part of the story. AI budgets remain relatively modest (see below), and, even among early adopters, no organizations in the study have deployed true AI.

AI investment modest but growing fast: Ninety-two percent of respondents say they will spend less than $5 million on AI in 2018. However, respondents indicate significant year-over-year increases in AI budgets, with 60 percent of respondents registering a 50 percent increase in AI budgets compared to last year.

Companies are investing in AI to help improve the customer experience and drive growth. When Constellation asked respondents to indicate the department(s) where AI is planned or implemented, IT, customer service/commerce, sales and marketing, and employee productivity ranked among the departments receiving the most planned or in-production AI spending. Driving this trend is the ease with which firms can acquire AI capabilities for these departments. Packaged apps with narrow AI capabilities are widely available for sales, marketing, employee productivity and commerce.

Potential AI-proficient talent shortage: Rising demand for workforce talent with AI proficiency poses a potential challenge for organizations that want to implement AI solutions. Eighty percent of executives say their organizations need to hire additional human capital to implement AI solutions. Seventy-two percent of organizations say they obtain new talent for AI projects via recruiting. Taken together, these two trends have the potential to culminate in a talent war as more AI projects come online.

Executives are feeling the pressure: Eighty-eight percent of executives say they expect their roles to change as their organizations adopt AI. Fifty-four percent of executives say they will need to understand how to restructure the business to accommodate new business models, 50 percent report a need to acquire data expertise and 48 percent report needing to learn how to motivate an AI-augmented team.

Resistance to AI: Fifty-two percent of respondents report resistance to AI within the organization. Top sources of resistance among those who reported resistance to AI include lines of business at 67 percent, IT at 32 percent and HR at 25%.

Among firms using or developing AI: Among firms using AI, 23 percent say their organization does not have a data privacy strategy to protect personal information ingested by AI.

Data privacy strategies are not yet ubiquitous: Thirty-one percent of organizations currently using AI do not have an opt-in policy to handle personal information ingested by AI.

Chris J. Preimesberger

Chris J. Preimesberger is Editor-in-Chief of eWEEK and responsible for all the publication's coverage. In his 13 years and more than 4,000 articles at eWEEK, he has distinguished himself in reporting...

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